Incentivizing Relay Participation for Securing IoT Communication

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a new computing paradigm that promises to offer a fully connected “smart” world. However, due to the open nature of wireless medium, the information sensed, collected, and transmitted by IoT devices can be easily intercepted by adversaries, which becomes a serious concern in most IoT applications requiring sensitive data. In practice, cooperative communication approaches can effectively improve the security level for wireless communication under the presence of eavesdroppers with unbounded computational ability. In this paper, we apply the amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication to increase the secrecy capacity of IoT systems by incentivizing relay IoT devices. Specifically, a Stackelberg game is designed to motivate the participation of the relay IoT devices for security enhancement. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility and security of the proposed mechanism under both unknown and known channel state information (CSI) models.